Joss Whedon’s ground-breaking TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended its run over 10 years ago. And though its influence on our cultural landscape is clear, it seems as though the larger takeaway lesson hasn’t properly stuck. That lesson? The geek community is ready for strong women. It has been for quite sometime. So why is this a war that’s still being waged?

The BBC America science-fiction show about clones and their mysterious origins has received a lot of critical notice, thanks in large part to an attention-grabbing performance from Tatiana Maslany, who expertly plays the show’s five main characters. The strong buzz around both the novelty of the concept and the show’s well-written cast of characters resulted in a 91 percent uptick in viewership for Orphan Black’s second season. What the extraordinary Orphan Black proves is that the geek community is not just ready for one type of badass woman; it’s ready for (at least) five.

Because Maslany’s performance and the show’s writing contain multitudes and run the gamut of archetypal feminine strength. We have Sarah (who covers wiliness, brawn, and a mothering instinct), Cosima (sheer brain power), Alison (cunning, heightened femininity, and another kind of mothering instinct), Rachel (ruthless ambition), and, best of all, Helena (relentless, feral strength). Helena is the show’s true gift to women, particularly in this season when she took on masculine oppression wherever she went, be it in bar fights (how Game of Thrones of her) . . .

Because the show is smart enough to back away from the concept that all female power needs to be of the mentally unbalanced variety, not all the women in Orphan Black are unhinged like Helena. But that’s why this show is such a complicated joy. Tatiana Maslany is every woman, literally. And sometimes she’s something else entirely. Maslany herself has commented on the decidedly feminist thrust of the show, which makes cloning and male-driven, scientific control a metaphor for sexual politics:

That always resonated for me as a woman to have this idea of our
bodies not being our own. That they’re owned by someone else. That the
image of them is owned by someone else. I feel that’s a very resonant
theme for young women like myself, and especially women in this
industry.

Orphan Black also makes room for strong, if feminine men. I’m not only referring to the gay co-lead Felix, played brilliantly by Jordan Gavaris. But in the maternal Cal and the emasculated Donnie, the show not only allows men to play traditionally feminine roles, but also allows them to have extraordinary strength within those roles.

The success and brilliance of Orphan Black is what makes other failures and exclusions that much worse. Pop culture creators still frequently claim their audiences are “not ready” for female leads, as when Orphan Black’s brother show Doctor Who hired, surprise surprise, another white man to play the 12th iteration of the long-running show’s titular lead. (Granted, a talented white man.)

Moffat, admittedly, has never had the tightest grip on what it means to write strong women, but there was zero pushback from male fans when the creators of the popular animated series Legend of Korra introduced a woman as the replacement for the beloved male-lead, Aang, in the continuation of the popular Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. NPR reported on Konietzko’s struggle to get the highly-popularLegend of Korra made,

Some Nickelodeon executives were worried about backing an animated
action show with a female lead character. Conventional TV wisdom has
it that girls will watch shows about boys, but boys won’t watch shows
about girls. During test screenings, though, boys said they didn’t
care that Korra was a girl. They just said she was awesome.

Konietzko, to his credit, created in Korra exactly the kind of fierce sci-fi/fantasy female lead that leaves us clamoring for more. “She’s muscular,” he said, “and we like that.”

What emerges here is that the concept of men not liking strong women (or that the world isn’t ready for gender equality in geek properties) has to be carefully taught; it resonates with adult men in a way it doesn’t with boys. Look no further than the popularity of the animated Star Wars: Clone Wars series, another kids show that featured a strong female lead; if you don’t instruct boys that they don’t want to watch girls in action, they’ll want to watch girls in action.

I think it would be exciting to be a part of a franchise or a
standalone film where the female superhero used those opportunities as
more than moments to stop, pause and look sexy, and actually have a
lot of a real depth to the story.

Well-written characters in geek properties will succeed with audiences regardless of gender, or color for that matter--women are far from the only group being marginalized by the geek mainstream. Female characters or characters of color may even do better when they represent something new and original. Maybe not that new and original, though. Like I said at the top, Buffy ended over 10 years ago. So then why does Orphan Black still feel so rare?